The 3-D Printer

3-D printing techniques offer a chance to make manufacturing more efficient and flexible, but as we'll hear they also pose challenges to traditional labour relations and to intellectual property rights.

(Please note that from January 29 2012 Future Tense will be moving to a new time - 11:30am on Sunday mornings. There will also be a repeat at 05:30 on Fridays.)

Transcript

Antony Funnell: Hello, Antony Funnell here and welcome to Future Tense and our summer highlights series. I'm just printing out a copy of this week's production script. Won't be a tick ...

[Printer]

Antony Funnell: The humble printer is a device we take for granted. I'm still in the flower of youth, of course, but I'm old enough to remember getting school newsletters that were printed on old roneo machines, newsletters were the print was pretty ropey and reeked of spirits.

But today, a state-of-the-art printer can make a colour copy that's as professional as the original product. Not this one of course, here at Radio National it's all black and white.

Now here's a thought: what if printers could replicate in 3-D, and what if they could make all sorts of things, from car parts to houses? Well, they can, and Tom Standage from The Economist believes we're on the cusp of something big.

Tom Standage: What's really interesting about 3-D printing now is that you have the same sort of buzz around it that you had around personal computers in the late 1970s. If you went back to that time, computers were things that you either found in the back rooms of very large companies, or you found hobbyists were building their own. And these two phenomena looked completely unrelated. You know, what did the hippies who were building stuff out of breadboards have to do with the guys in the back room of IBM?

But of course they were both manifestations of the same phenomenon, and it's a phenomenon that swept over the world and affected everybody. And that's really I think what's happening with 3-D printing now, that the hobbyists have got hold of it and said, 'You know, this is really cool', and they're building these very low-cost machines that do it, and there's a sort of groundswell of geek interestedness, and at the same time the big boys are getting increasingly serious about this as well. And if you look at the latest figures, whereas these printers have been used for the past few years to build prototypes of things, more and more of the output of 3-D printers is now actually being used to make real things. So you know, it's parts of cars, parts of aircraft, parts of 3D printers themselves, but rather than just use this as a sort of trial run before you start an ordinary manufacturing process, these printers are actually producing the final product.

Antony Funnell: 'A groundswell of geek interest' - now that's music to our ears here at Future Tense, so 3-D printing it is on today's program, and let's stay with Tom Standage, the Digital Editor for The Economist, to get a basic idea of what the technology involves.

Tom Standage: There are a number of different 3-D printing technologies, but essentially they work in the same way. If you imagine a 3-D object, and you kind of take slices out of it, you can imagine what each slice would look like, and then you could stack them all up. So how would you then make those slices to make a copy of that object? Well generally, these machines work by using say a bed of a dust-like material, which is either plastic or metal, and that's put down in a very thin layer, maybe a tenth of a millimetre thick. And then something like a print pad in a printer, moves over it, and it either zaps it with a beam which melts it or it sprays a kind of glue onto it or something like that, which then causes it to melt in some areas and stick together, and not in other areas. And once you've done a layer, you put another layer of dust on top and then you do the same again. And you can basically do this with a variety of materials now, and some of the time you use heat and sometimes use electron beams and some of the time you use glue and there are also versions of this technology that kind of squirt out solid material, a bit like a glue gun does; there are others that use resin, that hardens when you shine light on it. So there are different varieties of this.

But essentially they build the object up one layer at a time. And that's why within the industry this is known by the rather boring name of Additive Manufacturing. The 3-D printing industry all got together and said, 'We need a name for this', and they didn't like the name 3-D printing, they didn't like the name Rapid Prototyping, because this isn't just for prototypes any more. So they came up with this name, Additive Manufacturing, because you build things by adding stuff, rather than what you do on a lathe, say, where you take a piece of metal and you grind some of it away. So I think it's a pretty terrible name and we should stick with 3-D Printing.

Antony Funnell: And with the more sophisticated 3-D printers, I mean are we talking about devices that can print using different medium? Are we getting to that level of sophistication now? So they might be able to print certain parts in plastic, and also certain parts in metal?

Tom Standage: I don't know of one that mixes plastic and metal, but there are certainly some that can mix different kinds of plastic and plastics with a rubber-like material. So they're starting to get cleverer, and I think the thing you have to remember about these machines at the moment is that there are certain things they can print really well, particularly obscure shaped parts, and they can even print moving clockwork made out of plastic. So they can print incredibly detailed things. But you know, the idea that you're going to be able to print an iPhone out of one of these things, that's just not going to happen, because there are so many tiny, intricate components inside something like that which these machines just cannot print.

So the idea that you can print any object at all, you know, that's a science fiction dream, and maybe we'll get there eventually, but this is only the first of many, many steps that will need to be taken to get there. So for the time being it's sort of printing different coloured plastics and different plastics and some plastics that are stretchy, and some that are rigid, into a single object.

Antony Funnell: Now people are already starting to talk about 3-D printing, and to use the word 'revolutionary' when they do. Now, we've actually put 'revolutionary' and also 'revolution' in the Future Tense Black Book of Banned Words, or at least words we're reluctant to use when talking about technology, if at all possible. Out of interest we've also just recently added the suffix 2.0 for obvious reasons.

But back to my main point: some people now maintain that 3-D printing will have a transformative effect on manufacturing. Like us, Tom Standage is the sort of person not given to hyperbole, but his research suggests that the 3-D printing approach does offer manufacturers distinct advantages over traditional methods.

Tom Standage: If you're making something out of metal, there are a couple of interesting things that 3-D printing allows you to do. The first is that you can make pieces with 3-D printing that you could never make with any other technique, because when you're machining a piece of metal, that places constraints on the kinds of things you can do. You know, you can't cut round corners with a milling machine, and this sort of thing. If you just printed out the shape, you can have anything you like. So that's one thing. You can make a much less wasteful shape. You could have exactly the shape you want.

And then the other thing of course is that when you're milling material away on a lathe or with a milling machine or whatever, then that material ends up on the floor, and it's usually wasted, it's usually quite difficult to recycle. So as well as having pieces that you couldn't make any other way, they could actually require much less material, in some cases as little as 10% of material that you'd have needed in the first place. And you could also actually build pieces that are perfectly designed, so that you only have the material exactly where you need it, so in something like aeronautical engineering, where you're building a strut that goes into a wing or something like that, you really can build it in the sort of ideal shape, mathematically, that you'd like it to be, which might not have been possible to build in any other way. And of course that means weight savings, and that in turn means fuel savings, and lower emissions and cost savings and so forth. So there are a huge number of benefits to doing this, and that's why this is starting to become something that instead of just being used to make prototypes, is increasingly being used to make the final object.

Antony Funnell: Now for a manufacturer, of course quantity is as important as cost, being able to meet that demand. What's the prognosis for 3-D printing in terms of being able to compete with mass manufacturing?

Tom Standage: That's a very important factor. So essentially 3-D printing allows you to make one object and then make another one, and you're not having to set up a production line each time. If you're doing injection mouldings say, you have to make the moulds and you have to set the line-up, and then you know, there really isn't any point in doing it unless you're going to make 10,000 of something.

The way the costs are working at the moment, you can make about 1,000 objects in plastic for about the same price with 3-D printing as you can with conventional manufacturing techniques, and that threshold of 1,000 is gradually going up. So you know, maybe in a year or two it'll be 10,000, and then it'll be 100,000, and at that point, you'll start to say to yourself, 'Well hang on a minute, why don't we do everything this way?' The other thing about that of course is if you're making 1,000 of something, with 3-D printing it doesn't cost you anything extra for them to all be slightly different. So you can customise a run of 1,000 things. Of course you could never do that with a traditional manufacturing technique where everything has to be identical.

So it's even more effective for things where the ability to make slight variations is attractive, or something you can charge extra for. But I think the main thing is that this is a technique that's going to be used alongside conventional manufacturing. I assume at least for the foreseeable future, and there'll be specific areas where 3-D printing will have an enormous advantage. And then gradually, it will push aside more of the conventional manufacturing techniques portentially, in the next few years.

Antony Funnell: OK, a couple of interesting examples now of people directly involved in 3-D printing, the macro and the micro. And let's go for the big one first, and to Dr Berok Khoshnevis, who's an engineering professor at the University of Southern California.

Berok Khoshnevis: I have invented two technologies for 3-D printing and I have always been concerned about the slow speed of fabrication, and the limited use of material, limited materials, choices of materials that could be used. So I have been interested in building larger objects. I started by really concentrating on building larger industrial objects, but soon I transitioned into building components, and building the wall sections and structures out of concrete using this technology. But what is important to note is that only in the last 30 years in manufacturing, we have started looking at building layer by layer.

However for thousands of years in construction of buildings, they have been using the layered fabrication approach, you know, bricklaying is basically a layer fabrication method. So it is quite natural now to use this layer fabrication concept in construction of buildings, and I believe that the true potential of such technologies is actually in construction.

Antony Funnell: Professor Koshnevis calls his approach to additive construction, Contour Crafting, and his ultimate aim is to eventually build the wall structures for entire houses using a giant portable 3-D printing machine that will squirt out a special type of concrete.

Berok Khoshnevis: Contour Crafting is a technology that unlike other layer fabrication technologies, can use pretty fixed layers, you know. Our layers can be a thick as a brick, and we deposit them pretty fast, so a square metre of block could be conceivably built in about 3 minutes. So you can have a whole room built in less than an hour and a building with about 10 rooms can be built in less than 10 hours. So it is quite possible to build a building, average home about 200 square metres in less than a day using this technology.

So of course we are not quite there yet, but I have demonstrated fabrication of concrete walls of more than 2 metres tall, and demonstrated the strength of these walls and the different kinds of features. For examples, we have managed to build solid walls, we have built hollow walls with corrugated internal structures, and these walls are pretty light, and yet pretty strong ; they're good for insulation and as well - heat insulation.

Antony Funnell: What then has been the hold-up in terms of the future development, or the further development of the technology?

Berok Khoshnevis: Well the next step would be for us to develop a machine that would be deployable but can be taken outside where we could build a realistic structures in the field. We are in the process of building such a machine. There is still need for material research; current concrete can work; it needs some engineering, it needs additional some admixtures and some alterations, but I believe such a technology can actually benefit from newer materials. So the next stage really, building a deployable machine and using more specialised materials. And of course, trying different kinds of architectural futures.

Antony Funnell: And are you getting interest at this stage from the construction industry itself?

Berok Khoshnevis: Well the construction industry is very interested. I've been contacted by a number of construction companies. The problem is that they all want to be the users, and they know that the process of getting building code approval is probably a costly and maybe a lengthy one, so everyone is waiting for somebody else to pay for these development expenses, and then they say, 'Well we're going to use it, definitely.' So that has been a dilemma, and it's not unexpected for a disruptive technology like this.

Antony Funnell: From the macro now to the micro, and to a man with an eye on the small things.

Bre Pettis: When Zack, Adam and I were starting to mess around with 3-D printers, they were like $100,000 and we wanted one really badly, but we couldn't afford it. So we decided to try and figure out how we could make one ourselves, and when we did it, we made it so everybody could have one.

Antony Funnell: That's Bre Pettis, and he's one of the co-inventors of a device called The MakerBot. It's the desktop computer equivalent of the 3-D printer. It's relatively small, inexpensive and designed specifically for non-industrial use.

Bre Pettis: Having a 3-D printer on your desktop or at home in your living-room sounds super-futuristic but at this time there's 4,000 people with MakerBots in the world, living in the future, living that dream.

Well right now our machine is a DIY machines, so you get it, and you put it together, and one of the benefits of that is you also get an education in how a 3-D printer works, because you put it together yourself and that process is a learning process and by the end of putting it together, you're an expert on 3-D printers.

Antony Funnell: How long did it take you to actually perfect the first MakerBot?

Bre Pettis: You know, it look a lot of caffeine over two months. We basically just locked ourselves in our hacker space and prototyped and prototyped and prototyped and failed and failed and failed. Until we didn't; and then we launched.

Antony Funnell: And the MakerBot was the original version. You've now come up with with a - what would you say? - a new and improved version called the Thing-O-Matic, is that correct?

Bre Pettis: Yes that's correct. We launched first the CupCake which was a great start, and now we've got starting just this year we started shipping the Thing-O-Matic which is brand-new and you can make bigger things and it's more accurate and there's higher tolerances and it's all round a better machine.

Antony Funnell: In terms of making things, how long does it actually take to convert an image that you've got on your computer, on your laptop say, into a real physical object using the MakerBot or the Thing-O-Matic?

Bre Pettis: Well the way you start if you start with a 3-D model file, an STL file which is kind of like the text file 3-D model, and our software basically slices it up into layers and then it prints it. So from the start of things, an idea of thing, you can have an idea and design it and get it printing in about half an hour is probably the fastest you could go. But we have a site called thingiverse.com when you can just download things, so if you're not a designer, or you're inspired by some other people's work, instead of designing it yourself, you can just download it and cue it up on your printer and print it out, and that takes no time at all.

There's somewhere around 10,000 things that you can print out, just right away, without having to do anything on your MakerBot on thingiverse.

Antony Funnell: What about the rights and licensing issues involved here? How have you taken those into account?

Bre Pettis: Well we're open source nerds, so we encourage sharing. This is something that we learned early on in school, that sharing is good, and somehow as adults we forget this, but it actually works. So we encourage Creative Commons and open source licences and in fact the MakerBot is released under an open source licence. You can download all the files for the electronics and laser cut files, and anything you like, and know exactly how it works.

Antony Funnell: 'Open source nerds' who encourage sharing.

But not everybody follows the open source approach, or is happy with it. And it's around the area of intellectual property that Tom Standage sees trouble ahead.

Tom Standage: What happened with music was that CDs contain the perfect digital copy of the music and you could just read that into a computer and then you could start sharing it online. And that 3-D printing raises the spectre of is the opportunity to pirate objects as easily as you can pirate music, or films, or software.

Of course it's not quite as simple as that, but for some things which are really just 3-dimensional pieces of plastic like Lego, this could potentially be very bad news. My son is a big Lego fan and I am too, and occasionally I have to go out on to the internet and find some particularly obscure mini-figure, or something like that, and I end up paying quite a lot for it on eBay, and every time I do, I think to myself, 'Hang on a minute; in five years' time I bet I'll be able to find the plans for this particular minifigure and you know, go to my neighbourhood fabrication site and say, 'Hi, can you print me one of these please?' Maybe I'll print 5 of them and sell some of them on eBay.

This is the kind of thing that you know, will probably start to happen and it is going to challenge intellectual property rules. We've already started to see some lawsuits around this. So that's one of the debates that's starting to take place. And on the one hand there are people who say, 'This means we need to limit the distribution and the use of these machines; it's a massive problem.' And then there are other people on the other side who say, 'No, because that will hamper innovation', so it's really unclear whether we need tighter intellectual property laws as a result of these machines or looser ones.

[Printer noise]

Michael Weinberg: 3-D printing is one of the technologies that when you first hear about it you kind of do a double-take and you think to yourself, Well this can't be real. And then the person who's explaining it to you goes on a little bit further, the almost universal response is, 'That sounds really, really awesome.' And for the paper there's a little bit about you know, it definitely will be awesome, but there are some pitfalls and so the fear is it will be awesome unless somebody screws it up unless those pitfalls are realised and someone moves the goalposts a little bit and changes some laws in a way that make the awesomeness of 3-D printing unable to be realised.

Antony Funnell: Michael Weinberg there. And the white paper he's talking about is titled (no surprises) 'It will be awesome if they don't screw it up'. It was written in November last year by Mr Weinberg, who's a staff lawyer - staff attorney as the Americans say - for the group Public Knowledge, which describes itself as a 'Washington-based public interest advocacy organisation dedicated to promoting the public interest in access to information'.

Michael Weinberg: Although I would say a majority of the objects are going to come out of a 3-D printer are not going to be infringing on anyone's rights, it's undeniable that a 3-D printer could be used to infringe on copyright could be used to infringe on patents, and could be used to infringe on trademarks. And so those owners are going to have a problem.

Similar to some of the problems that content owners such as the music industry and then the movie industry had, which is all of a sudden the pool of people who can potentially infringe on your rights, grows exponentially and becomes incredibly more diffuse. And so the rights holders for physical objects, the people who own those patents for example, are going to have to decide how to adapt to that.

And just as with the movie and the music industry there was a bit of a transition period where some of the advantages of being able to distribute music and movies digitally had been embraced by some music and movie companies, hopefully some of those patent holders, and some of those people who own copyrights in physical objects will recognise that although there's certainly potential downsides to widespread use of 3-D printing, there are also incredible advantages and advantages that they can take advantage of and really move forward with capitalising on the fact that there are 3-D printers, instead of just seeing them as an enemy.

Antony Funnell: You mentioned transition there. In your paper, you made the point that 3-D printing, it's not going to emerge overnight, or it isn't emerging as an overnight phenomenon, that it's gradually emerging. Now the legal issues that you foresee, are we starting to see evidence of those legal issues coming to the fore in terms of things like lawsuits?

Michael Weinberg: We're just beginning to see the very first wave of them - if even that. I think you could probably actually say that we're just beginning to be able to see in the distance the first wave of them. Part of that is because 3-D printing is coming, but it is not here. There is certainly availability of these machines, but they are more or less for hobbyists or for high-end design companies - they haven't yet reached the place that computers were, say in the mid-'90s.

But there's a website called thingiverse, which is a website where people design physical objects and they upload those objects and then other people can download the file and create objects on their own 3-D printers. And so it's a great sharing site for people who design 3-D objects. And that website got its first copyright take-down notice a couple of weeks ago. And that was the first time in that community's history that someone had asserted copyright infringement. Fortunately, that story ended well. After a couple of days of I would say a trauma and hand ringing within the community, the person who submitted the copyright claim decided to donate their design to the public domain, so it was an open question whether or not it was proper to say that the design was protected by copyright or not. But no-one had to address those questions fully because the author donated whatever rights that he had to the public domain and withdrew his take-down request.

So that was the first time anything like this had happened. It's likely not to be the last, and it will be interesting to see how they develop over time. But you haven't seen any sort of massive lawsuits or strings of lawsuits like you did in the music and movie industry in the late '90s and early 2000.

Antony Funnell: And with emerging technologies over the last 20, 30, 40 years, we know that the pace of emergence has been difficult for legislators, for regulators, to keep up with. Is there any evidence to suggest that things are going to be different this time with regard to 3-D printing?

Michael Weinberg: Right now there is not a lot of legislative action at least in the United States directly focused on 3-D printing. We're actually going to do an event here in Washington to kind of be that first introduction between the 3-D printing community and policymakers in the United States. But it's unclear right now what kind of connection the two will have and how well legislators will be able to respond.

Traditionally, I mean look, making laws and making policy is slow, and innovation is fast. So one of the things that we are focused on from a policy standpoint is making sure that legislators and lawmakers and policymakers don't move so quickly, to try and stop what they perceive as a threat, and in doing so, really stop all the innovation. That is a great fear right now, that new laws will be passed in a rush and out of fear and concern of something that could happen in the future, and when those laws are passed, it sort of stifles any further innovation in this area.

Antony Funnell: Michael Weinberg, staff attorney with Public Knowledge, thank you very much for joining us.

Michael Weinberg: Thank you.

Antony Funnell: And yes, in case you were wondering, the thingiverse website Michael Weinberg mentioned there is the very same one operated by Bre Pettis and the MakerBot guys.

Now we began the show with Tom Standage and let's end with him and another potential impact the 3-D printing process could have if and when it begins to move in a significant way into the mass manufacturing field.

Tom Standage again, via Skype.

Tom Standage: Yes there's quite a lot of excitement in America in particular, among proponents of 3-D printing that this is an opportunity to re-set the economics of manufacturing, and of course the economics of manufacturing in the past decade or two have been that it's much cheaper to do manufacturing in Asia, because labour costs are much lower. Labour costs are a big part of manufacturing costs, shipping is basically free, and it really doesn't cost very much by comparison. So that encourages manufacturing to move to Asia.

And the idea is, that if labour gets taken out of the equation because you're essentially using these printers to spit out finished objects, you're not having to set up lines and move partially completed objects from one line to another and do assembly, all that kind of stuff, because the printer can do it all. Suddenly Asia doesn't have an advantage any more, and you can repatriate manufacturing in America, but of course if that's true, and I'm convinced that it is, because I think actually the Asian manufacturers are in just as good a position to take advantage of this technology as anyone else, but even if you say, OK, manufacturing comes back to America, it may not bring many jobs with it because if that's all true that there is no labour costs and so on, that tells you that there's no labour and there are no jobs, so I think that's probably going a bit far, and I think it's much more likely that it will be adopted by Asian manufacturers as well.

Antony Funnell: But certainly some sort of realignment?

Tom Standage: I think there's bound to be, and I think it will certainly make it easier to defend high cost manufacturing and the kind of manufacturing where it's much more about the designs and the ideas than it is about the cost of manufacturing. So we're already started to see this with the 3-D manufacturing companies that pop up, and essentially you send them a file and they send you back an object, and they can charge quite a lot for doing that because it's so cool, and if you need a one-off of a particular object, then you're prepared to pay for it. And for those companies it really doesn't matter if they're cited in a high labour cost economy. So they are already in the rich world, and it doesn't make any sense for them to go anywhere else.

And you can imagine that there might be other services, and you can do things like print out your World of Warcraft avatar, there are all these sorts of quite highly value added services that are already being built around 3-D printing. And so those will appear in the rich world and I also think it will be possible to defend the sorts of complicated things that are made in the rich world like aeronautical parts and aircraft engines and so forth. I think it will be easier to defend those niches with this new technology.

Antony Funnell: Fun and games 3-D printing. And before Tom Standage we heard from Bre Pettis, Michael Weinberg, and Berok Khoshnevis.

You've been listening to Future Tense. My co-producer is Andrew Davies. And the sound engineer for this week's program was Jim Ussher.

Remember you can follow us on Twitter. Where our name is RNFuturetense. That’s all one word. We welcome your thoughts and /or suggestions. And, of course, if you want to send us an email you can as well by going to our website and clicking on the tab marked “have your say”.

And before pulling up stumps another reminder that come the end of this month we’ll be moving to a new broadcast time. From the 29th you’ll be able to hear us every Sunday at 11.30 am – with a repeat on Friday mornings at 5.30 for those of you who like to get up with the birds. So write those times in your diary - or go to our website if you haven’t got a pen handy.

Credits

Comments (4)

Lesley :

07 Jan 2012 5:38:43pm

Sorry that your timeslot is being changed. I enjoyed this program and would listen on my way to work every Thursday, which is the only time I listen to the radio. I found it very interesting and informative.

Alistair :

Interesting show, but it only scratched the surface of what 3D printing will bring. You covered the technical, but did not touch the social.

You spent a lot of time talking about copyright (oh the poor corporations!) but not once mentioned the massive job losses which will result from this technology.

Manufacturing has lifted entire communities, if not countries, out of poverty. With globalisation, corporations were able to sack masses of workers and move manufacturing to cheaper countries. Great for them.

Now they will be clamouring to make redundant that last rung of the ladder up from poverty. It will take some time, but once a lot of things which are made in China can be made (and pre-assembled mind you) using printers, what happens to basic employment around the world?

Not to mention sales of toys.. why buy a genuine Star Wars collectible for $50 when you can print it yourself, movable legs and all? And you can customise it or make it better.

And then there's traditional crafts. Why take those ceramics classes, when you can print your own custom-designed vase or figurine sitting on your butt at the computer?

On the other hand, what about the explosion of creativity that will result? What about the enormouos potential for reducing manufacturing waste and pollution?

None of this was explored on the show, which was a bit disappointing, considering the potential of this technology.

kate :

08 Jan 2012 9:17:32pm

it's not as if people stopped painting when 2d printing became possible!In the given time obviously not everything can be covered, i liked the show. We will deal with the social consequences as they arise, as we have always done. It is a fast changing world nowadays and fear of future unemployment is not going to slow it down...

Troglodyte :

06 Feb 2012 9:05:54pm

In 1900 about 14% of Australians worked on farms.

If in 1900 you had told a farmer that 100 years later only 3% of people would work on farms, he'd have said two things:1) Everyone will be starving to death; and2) There will be huge riots by the 11% of people out of work.

Technology changed the structure of employment away from agriculture, but we didn't starve and we didn't have riots.

3D printing will cause changes too. But you are wrong is your pessimistic conclusions.